The Hortus Hermitage
A self-sustaining retreat for two occupants, situated within the botanical gardens of Haren, adjacent to Groningen, the Netherlands.
The structure employs two decommissioned agricultural silos combined with residual materials from the botanical garden’s maintenance operations, transforming on-site waste streams into architectural elements. Embedded within an earthen berm, the installation mediates between two garden zones while the silos retain their industrial morphology even as they acquire domestic function. This approach preserves the structural logic inherent to the source material, asking what architectural possibility it already contains rather than what can be imposed upon it.
